I wasn’t in Sandra’s class until second grade, and at first, I didn’t like her. Sandra wasn’t what you would ever describe as nice and she had a disquieting ability to hone in on the things you didn’t want to talk about, didn’t want anyone to notice about you (which Regina always did, too; the difference is Regina never brought them up. But maybe they talked about all those things in everyone else to each other). But she grew on me; she always said things no one else was willing to and she made me laugh, and there’s something to be said for always knowing where you stand with someone. She was the only one of my friends who was an only child like I was, and she always complained that it wasn’t fair for it to be just you against both your parents, although she said several times she’d trade hers for mine, or for anyone’s. Once in fourth grade I saw her arguing with her mom in the parking lot—they were in the car and Sandra had just buckled her seat belt and she said something I couldn’t hear, and her mom whirled around from the front seat and slapped her. I never told her I’d seen. She could find the dark streak in anything, in those cheesy inspirational posters hanging around the school or in movies everyone else loved or in people, too. Her house backed up against a creek and once, the summer we were eleven and she was home alone, she invited me over and we went down through the gap in the fence. It was almost dry in the creek bed, just standing pools of water everywhere and crackly dead leaves, and we played with the tadpoles all afternoon. She’d said they reminded her of Mrs. Polnicek—“Tadpolniceks!” she’d said, cackling in triumph while I rolled my eyes—our teacher that year who I’d liked, actually. “Sludgy and useless,” she’d said, chasing one around the water with her finger. “Sound familiar?” I liked Mrs. Polnicek, but, I mean, I could kind of see it; I laughed. Sometimes I wondered if Regina always stuck by her so closely because next to Sandra she got to feel like a better person, the nice one, the one who saw the best in people.
Anyway, at the beginning of junior high, the bulk of my friendship with Sandra was talking crap about Harry. Harry had gone to Blue Hills for elementary school, so this was the first time everyone I knew had been exposed to him, and it was, to put it mildly, a strange feeling watching all the people you thought you knew flock to someone you despised, someone phony and cheaply charismatic. Of Course People Like You If You Con Them Into Thinking You Like Them: The Harry Wong Story.
But Harry was, for whatever reason, completely magnetic. He was (I had to admit it) objectively good-looking, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones and a quick, easy smile that he knew how to aim for maximum effect; he had a friendly self-deprecating way of talking and could, without warning, slip into saying things that were constantly hailed as really deep (once, when Aaron Ishido joked about Brett Lee being the most punch-worthy person in our grade, Harry was like, Nah, man, violence is never cool, and I once heard him argue with a straight face that all racism was rooted in misunderstanding). He was forever laughing and joking around with people, always changing the tenor of every circle he walked into. He was the kind of person conversations stopped for. Which was baffling because, to me, underneath the veneer of aggressive perfection, he seemed thoroughly mediocre. There was nothing interesting or different about him; he was just exactly the perfect prototype of everything Cupertino wanted you to be: smart, polished, rich. He wasn’t different or unique, he was just what everyone else was, only more so, like someone took the rest of us and turned us up to Technicolor.
Also, a full month into the school year (a school year in which we had not one, not two, not three, but four classes together), we were funneled into the same test-review group in history and he’d turned to me with that plastered-on smile and said, “Remind me your name again?”
I know it all sounds petty. To this day I’m not entirely sure why I took such an instant dislike to him, why his very existence felt so personal to me. In my defense, I was a seventh grader, and there’s no such thing as a good seventh grader; all seventh graders are assholes, even the nice ones. Maybe it was just rampant hormones, who knows. Maybe it was how sometimes he bought things at Goodwill and him doing it was somehow cool, proof of him being down-to-earth and unique and environmentally conscious, whereas I knew that if I did it because I didn’t have money it would be a different story altogether. Maybe I was jealous.
But when I really think about it, I wonder if maybe it’s more than that; maybe it’s something that hits close to the deepest core of who I am. I’m not a religious person, but what I have with Harry is the closest thing I have—when I’m with him is when the world is at its clearest for me. I didn’t understand that yet, though, sitting on the bleachers with Sandra, blazing with all those ways I hated him.
Whenever there’s some kind of prize of any kind up for contention, I don’t care who you are: you always imagine yourself winning it. So I imagined Harry saying things like, Hey, I’ve always thought you seemed cool. You want to come hang out at this thing I’m having Saturday? I imagined him bringing up the party at lunchtime. I resented him for taking up so much space in my mind, and resented myself for giving it to him, but that didn’t mean I stopped. I also: liked a few of his posts online and then kept checking to see if he’d reciprocated in any way, nodded at him a few times in class, played four or five pickup basketball games with him and some other guys after school.
The last one was the Friday before the party. We were dispersing, sweaty and spent, when I heard someone call, “Yo, Cheng!”
I turned around and Harry was coming after me. “Wait up,” he said. “I want to ask you something.”
There was a spark in my chest like a lighter. Maybe I’d been wrong about him after all. I would take back all the hateful thoughts I’d had about him and all the things I’d said to Sandra; I would take back my assessment of him as fake. “Yeah, what’s up?”
“Do you have the homework assignment for first period?” he said, hitching the straps on his backpack higher. “I was late.”
The next morning, the morning of his party, Harry posted a selfie of him giving two thumbs up. Celebrating my birthday at Dynasty today at noon, come on by! he wrote. All welcome!!
That was it for me. My rage ballooned. Harry Wong wanted literally everything for himself, including, apparently, the credit for being friendly and inclusive and magnanimous, which—screw that. No one was going to go and feel welcomed because of some vague throwaway comment online.
Did you see Harry’s post? I texted Sandra. I should go just to call him on it.
I’m going! she wrote back. With Regina. You should just come. My mom can come pick you up if you want.
You’re going? What the hell, I thought you hated him.
I don’t have anything against him as a person. I just like watching you freak out about it. A few seconds later she texted, again, You should come.
My heart plummeted down my chest like it was falling through a trapdoor. I had to put my phone down. The weekend spanned itself in front of me. My mom was at the Lis’ house with the twins, who were babies then, because the parents were both out of town on business and so I’d be stuck at home with my dad, who was worse than ever on weekends, answering questions in a grayish monotone voice and staring blankly at the TV, cocooned on the couch in his ratty sweats and unwashed hair.
My dad found me in my room, furiously drawing ugly-looking caricatures of Harry. He watched me for a little while, then patted his stomach. “Want to go get donuts, Daniel?”
“No.”
He watched me draw. “Who is that?”
“Just a guy at school.”
“You don’t like him?”
“No.” He waited for me to elaborate. Finally I said, “He had this party today and everyone was acting like it was this huge important thing. I don’t know. It’s stupid. He’s kind of full of himself.”
I immediately regretted telling him—my dad can be so advice-y, and I wasn’t in the mood. Instead, though, he said, “Let’s go on a hike.”
“I don’t feel like hiking.”
&nb
sp; “Fresh air will be good for you. Put on some shoes. It’ll be fun.”
So we drove up into the hills and went hiking at Fremont Older. You drive up Prospect where it winds into the hills and is barely big enough for two cars to fit, park under the oak trees next to the country club, the branches gathering you away from the sunlight, and you hug the side of the hill and pass some shut-off wooden homes and then the trail spills you onto a wide dirt path in a clearing. The dusty path leads up bare grassy hills until you get to Hunter’s Point and you can see the whole Bay Area sprawled out below, all gray-green and red-roofed, from so high up blurred in a way that always makes me think of an artist I like named Dashiell Manley, who makes these explosive, haunting oil-on-linen paintings, textured dabs of color that make your eyes feel thirsty and inadequate. I hadn’t wanted to come, but my dad was right—it was nice being up here, kind of like being in another world. Literally above it all. My dad was making an obvious effort to be in a good mood, and we saw hawks and a few deer and I watched the way people looked hiking, the lines their bodies made from their tiredness and determination. Any other day it would’ve been fine; it wouldn’t have felt like a consolation prize.
We were headed back to the parking lot, coming around a narrow switchback with a steep drop-off, when he hit a root and stumbled. My mind flashed forward. I could see the accident before it happened—him tumbling down the ravine, the search parties I’d try to flag down, the guilt I’d feel for all the times and all the ways I’d holed up in my room quarantined from his obvious sadness, what it would do to my mom to lose a daughter and then a husband, too. But I was wrong about it—he flailed his arms and grabbed at a shrub, and steadied himself. When he pulled his hand away his palm was bleeding, but he was laughing.
“That was close,” he said. “Hey, it’s not so bad, right? You aren’t at your party, but we’re not lying at the bottom of a ravine.”
My heart was pounding. I was embarrassed by my own fear. “If you say so.”
“Say it’s better or I’ll throw you down this hill. Now I know the way down.”
It made me laugh in spite of myself. Afterward, we went to go get donuts at Donut Wheel. My dad ate two. My dad, who deserved a party and a celebration and happiness and instead all that went to Harry, who’d done nothing to earn any of it.
Monday was Harry’s actual birthday, a fact I learned when I showed up for school that morning and it was like a balloon store threw up all over campus and Harry’s face was plastered all over the halls. People decorated like this for their friends’ birthdays, but I’d never seen anyone take it this seriously. There were flyers with his face taped to pretty much every bank of lockers, including my own. When I went to get my books, there was his extraordinarily satisfied face, staring right at me.
I thought: NOPE. I pulled my Sharpie from my pocket, glanced around to see if anyone was watching, and drew over the flyer. I edited his features—I made his eyes more leering, more pleased with themselves, and then I zoomed in on his mouth, trying to shape it to make it look self-congratulatory and smug as all hell.
“You didn’t like the original?”
I knew before I turned around. I turned around anyway. Harry was watching me, his arms folded across his chest.
“What is this?” he said. “Is this supposed to be me?”
Of course it was. There was no use denying it, either. It looked like him. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
He let his arms drop and then reached in front of me and tore the paper off the lockers. The expression on his face—at the time I thought it was disgust. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Uh—” I tried to grab for the paper, but he held it out of my reach. “It’s nothing. I was just screwing around.”
“Why?”
What are you supposed to say to that? Finally I said, again, “I was just messing around.”
He stared at me a long time. It occurred to me to wonder if maybe he was going to hit me. He didn’t, though. He said, “Can I keep this?”
It caught me off guard—it was the last thing I expected—and I nodded before I could stop myself. Anyway, it’s not like I could’ve asked for it back.
He didn’t crumple it up, either. He folded it carefully in half, then swung his backpack around and unzipped it and slipped the drawing into his binder. Then he walked away, taking the drawing with him: tangible proof he could fold up and keep of what a petty, vindictive person I was, something that would leave me always on the hook.
My heart was still thudding as Harry rounded the corner out of sight. I had to stop walking to let it slink back into its normal patter. Which seemed like a massive overreaction, except that I think, when I try to re-create that flash of time, I’d done it on purpose for him to see—for a split second there I’d imagined the worst and then wanted it. Or brought it into being, at least, which in the end might as well be the same thing. I’d like to say I lost myself for a moment, and that’s why. But that’s the easy way out. It seems equally possible that in those moments you just let go, when you give in to your impulses, that those are the moments that are most you.
Originally, my parents weren’t going let me go on the eighth-grade science camp trip to Yosemite. My mom was too worried the bus would crash, or I’d get lost in the snow and freeze to death, or I’d slip off a cliff hiking and plunge to the rocky ground hundreds of feet below.
Besides that, things always felt unstable at home. My dad still wasn’t himself, although it was starting to feel like this faded version we had to tiptoe around was his real self after all. It’s hard living with someone who’s never happy—a dark mist hovers over everything that happens in the household and you feel guilty when you want to be happy yourself. I worried about him, and I worried maybe he was going to divorce my mom or that she’d decide to divorce him. I had my cycle down pat: I’d be sullen and quiet around them, upset I had to worry about any of this, and then at night lying awake I’d be guilt-stricken and resolve to do better in the morning. It was draining, and I was pretty close to desperate to get to Yosemite even if for no other reason than to get out of the house.
It was Auntie Mabel, my mom’s best friend, who talked them into it, saying science camp was good for my education and that I’d love going. I did love going. Sometimes even now it chills me to think how much of my life would’ve never happened if I just hadn’t gone.
I stayed in a cabin with Maurice Wong and Aaron Ishido and Ahmed Kazemi, other denizens of the group of us who hung out in the middle of the pavilion at lunch—loud, visible, sending ripples into all the peripheral groups gathered around the outskirts. After that drawing I’d kind of thought Harry would muscle me out of his circle, and he could’ve, too, but he hadn’t. Since last year we’d mostly ignored each other, and I always tried to avoid him, but middle school doesn’t let you do that; once earlier that year we’d walked into Geometry at the same time (I’d seen it coming and tried to change my pace, but it hadn’t worked), and he’d dipped his head in acknowledgment and held open the door and motioned for me to go ahead. I’d felt him watching me as I went past him, and sometimes in class I would’ve sworn I felt him watching me, too, although every time I checked he moved his head too quickly for me to see if I was right.
Daytimes in Yosemite we were assigned to hiking groups and we traipsed through practically frozen creeks and did trust falls and foraged miner’s lettuce and we were all given trail books to sketch what we saw (I drew portraits of all the other people in my group and gave them to everyone at the end of the week), and ever since then I’ve been pretty friendly with the random collection of people who were in my group, and I still think of them—Jinson Tu and Jefferson Choy and Helena Heggem and Serina Kim and Annie Chong—as a single unit.
We weren’t allowed to take cell phones out on the hikes with us, and Thursday, the day we hiked Yosemite Falls, when I got back to the cabin thirsty and sore before dinner there was a message from my mom.
“Hello, Daniel, it’s Ma.
I’m taking your father to the doctor. Just so you know. He’s all right, but he’s very sad.”
He’s very sad. It isn’t fair to resent a dead baby, but in that moment I did.
I wished I didn’t have to go back home; I wished I could just stay here and pretend everything was fine. I didn’t see a way out of my dad just always drowning in his sadness, and I didn’t see a way out of me having to carry that with me my entire life.
It was Thursday night, the night before we’d all get up and stumble bleary-eyed out of our cabins by seven the next morning to get to the dining hall and then check onto our buses, that I couldn’t take the feeling anymore. All the guys in my cabin were asleep and it was after midnight, definitely after the nine p.m. curfew, but I figured there probably weren’t any chaperones wandering around outside and so I slid as quietly as I could out of my sleeping bag and grabbed my ski jacket and went out into the cold.
It was close to freezing outside, my breath puffing in front of me, the moon behind the clouds turning the whole sky a pale, glowing gray. There were small patches of snow under the eaves and on the ground where even during the day it was mostly shadow, and it was bracingly quiet—no wind rustling trees, no cars. The moon was bright enough to light the snow fairly well, and so I walked past the cabins. I had some vague idea of getting to the clearing by the dining hall, where there were some benches carved out of logs, but I’d only gotten twenty or thirty feet when, from the near dark, someone said, “Hi, Danny.”
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