I whirled around, my heart thudding, ready for I don’t know what—and then it was Harry sitting mostly hidden in the shadows on a rock, a scarf wrapped around his neck and his beanie pulled all the way down over his ears. It caught me entirely off guard. I said, “What are you doing out here?”
“Eh, I just couldn’t sleep.” I could see puffs of air when he spoke. He didn’t look as surprised to see me as I was to see him, which meant, probably, that he’d been watching me for a little while. “You?”
“Uh—same.”
He jostled his shoulders up and down a few times. “It’s freezing out here, though. I can’t feel, like, ninety percent of my body anymore.”
“How long have you been sitting out here?”
“An hour, maybe. Two.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to get in hella trouble if you get caught?”
“Aren’t you?”
I mean, yeah, okay. “Touché.”
“Well, anyway—” To this day, what he did next surprises me: he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small metal flask and offered it to me. Harry was not—he was absolutely not—the kind of guy you found drinking alone in the snow after curfew, and I blinked at him, my eyes trying to make sense of all the pieces. “Uh—I’m not sure if—”
“You don’t drink? Don’t worry about it, it’s cool. I brought it for my cabin, and then we just—there was never a good time.”
“It’s not that, I just—” I looked at him closer. “Are you, like, okay and everything? Is something wrong?”
“No, yeah, everything’s fine.” He flashed an extremely unconvincing smile. He pocketed the flask again without drinking from it. “Everything’s cool. I just couldn’t sleep.”
I could’ve gone back inside. There were a lot of things I could’ve done, actually—I could’ve left him there, or I could’ve reported him to someone or held on to the information to dole out like currency. And he knew that, I think. It didn’t feel like arrogance that had made him say hi or ask me to drink with him; it felt more like, for whatever reason, while he was sitting there on that log knowing I wasn’t alone as I thought I was, he made some kind of choice to trust me. Or not trust me, maybe, but at least to put some small part of his fate in my hands. And I owe the past four years to that decision, honestly. I don’t think I would’ve done the same.
Anyway, it felt like I owed him, at least a little bit, for that. I said, “How come you couldn’t sleep?”
It felt like a risk. Maybe it always does talking to someone you don’t like, because they could turn it on you in any of several ways. I spent the next few seconds of his silence regretting it, picturing a way to extricate myself from this conversation. Then finally he said, “Sometimes—” He stared out into the dark. “Do you ever get tired of all of this?”
“All of what?”
“You know. Just the always—just everything. Like school. Cupertino. You know.”
“Tired of it how?”
“Just having to do all of it all the time. Even when you’re worried you’ll never pull it off or it feels like what’s your reward in the end—you just get to do more of the same for longer? You know? And then nothing you do is ever good enough anyway. You ever feel like that?”
“Sometimes, I guess.” Then I added, “It never seems like you do.”
“Why not?”
“You’re so, like—peppy all the time.”
He cocked his head and grinned at me. He has a grin that can change the whole mood in a room; I’ve seen it happen so many times, but that was the first time it happened to me. “Peppy?”
“Ah—maybe that’s not the best word. I’m just surprised, that’s all. You play the game pretty well.”
“Peppy, huh.” He rubbed his hands over his arms, then tucked them under his armpits. “Regina told me you want to be an artist.”
Was he thinking of the picture I’d drawn of him? I was glad it was mostly dark. “Yeah.”
“That’s kind of cool. It’s like a big F-you to the system, right?”
“Nah, it’s just that I suck at math.”
He laughed. “Like Asian suck, or actually suck?”
“No, like actually suck. I still don’t understand how to graph a line.”
“What do you mean you don’t understand? You just take the slope—”
“I know, I know. Or, I mean—I don’t know. But I can recite the words like that too. Slope-intercept. Rise over run.” This was unexpected—maybe it was just the weirdness of the whole situation—but I was kind of smiling. “I can draw a line. That’s good enough.”
“No, that’s not good enough, what the hell?” He looked around. “Find me a stick or something. I’ll write it out for you in the snow. This night is going to end with you learning how to graph a line.”
“That’s not—”
“No. I’m on a mission. We’re doing this.” He propelled himself off the rock in an athletic kind of way and went for one of the trees until he found a stick to snap off. This was that same condescension, wasn’t it? But why did it feel so different all of a sudden?
He did it, too—he drew his axes in the snow and explained it about a dozen times until—small miracle—I did mostly understand. Then he tossed the stick to the ground and raised his arms in triumph. “Mission accomplished.”
And that was the first time I had the same feeling I’ve felt probably thousands of times with him since then—that small panic about the moment ending. My heart felt kind of strange, sort of galloping against my chest. It made me wonder if maybe quantum entanglement felt like a prickling extra-awareness, like all your atoms poised for action and humming with desire—like a thing between you that’d never quite lie still. I felt hyperaware of how, if I leaned a few inches closer, our arms would brush together.
I wasn’t ready to go back to my stuffy cabin and Aaron and Ahmed and Maurice passed out in their grimy sleeping bags, back to the house where my dad was slowly mummifying himself in his sadness that I was pretty sure a doctor wouldn’t be able to magic him out of. I said, “I know what you mean about being tired.”
His expression changed. He toed at the stick in the snow, then stepped on it with his hiking boot until it crunched in half. “Yeah. Well.”
“This week was better, though, right? Like, it was nice to be here.”
“I guess. Sometimes I just don’t think it’s all worth it. Like maybe it would better to just go live in like, Ohio or something and just be a coal miner.”
I leaned against the wall of the cabin. I could hardly feel my face. “Is that a thing? Somehow I doubt they’re just waiting for some random Asian kid to show up from Cupertino ready to coal-mine.”
His eyes crinkled into a smile, enmeshing me in the joke. “I’d do Taiwan proud.”
“Okay, then. Represent.”
He let go of the smile. “It’s probably crappy there anyway. That’s the worst part. This is probably all there is. So if you don’t play, it’s just—” He lifted his arms and then let them fall to his sides.
And I knew exactly what he meant. Any one of us standing out there with him would’ve, because Cupertino really gets to you. It’s not like it’s this friendly, squishy, huggy place where mediocrity is fine and it’s cool if you fail or just aren’t that good at anything, and everyone here knows it. We were all tired and stressed out all the time, all of us worried we’d never be good enough, many of us explicitly told we weren’t good enough, so it wasn’t like his problems were special or different or more tragic than anyone else’s. We all felt it, the relentless crush of expectation, the fear of not measuring up—even me, and I like it here, and as Asian parents go mine are about as chill as they come.
So it didn’t have to feel like some big moment between us; it could’ve felt like talking to basically anyone in my grade. I guess it was just that I knew it wasn’t something he ever showed to anyone, but that night, for whatever reason, he did to me. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Hey, Harry?”
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“Yep.”
I could feel my frozen face turning red. “Hey, I’m, um, I’m sorry about that picture thing last year. Drawing on it.”
“Oh—whatever. Don’t worry about it.”
“It was just kind of a dick thing to do.”
“It’s cool, really.” He kind of laughed. “I think I still have it, actually. Somewhere on my desk. You’re really talented. It looked more like me than the picture did. I always hated that picture.”
“The picture was fine.” I kicked at some snow. “I thought you might try to ruin my life over that.”
“You thought what?” He looked legitimately startled. “Why would I do that?”
And I believed him. It was genuine, that confusion, and that was the first time I really saw him, I think—when I understood that his social persona was concealing none of what I’d always thought it was, but actual niceness instead, that there was a kind streak at his core.
It wouldn’t be until a few weeks later that I’d understand about the rest of it, but that would happen, too, in Honors History when Mr. DiBono passed back our midterms. I’d see Harry turn his over without looking at it and then sit super still for a long time, his eyes trained on the teacher like he was trying to will himself into not looking. He lasted twenty minutes, and then he looked down and peeled back just the top corner of the page where the grade was written. From across the classroom I saw the way his whole body deflated, and then I saw the way he gathered himself up and hid that, and something about it was so practiced, so automatic, that I understood for the first time how much this was a part of him. I mean, it was a small moment: it was over fast, and it wasn’t something we ever talked about. But I saw everything differently after that, I think because it’s hard to turn away from someone after you’ve really seen them. You carry that part of them with you, and it becomes your job to protect it, too.
But that was later. For the time being, in the snow, Harry clapped his hand on my shoulder. I could feel it through all the layers of jacket and glove, could feel it like there wasn’t all that fabric in between us.
“We should sleep,” he said, and something about the way he said it, something about that we—I think I knew in that moment how much I’d want to always be covered by it, how I’d always want there to be a space for me inside it, how I would maybe be willing to do things I wouldn’t have imagined in order to make it so.
We walked together back to the cabins. And that was the first night.
My dad wasn’t seeming very much better by the time eighth-grade graduation rolled around; it had been a rough couple months. The doctor hadn’t helped because my dad didn’t believe in taking the antidepressants he’d been prescribed or in going to the counseling she’d suggested, so he didn’t. All through the ceremony my mom was wiping her eyes, and when I found my parents after on the lawn, all the guys roasting in dress pants and dress shirts and all the girls tottering as their heels sank into the grass, she was crying. I’d been with Harry, taking pictures with different people and all that, but when we saw my parents Harry whacked me on the back and said he’d catch me later. And maybe it was “Pomp and Circumstance” still playing all emotionally in the background, but seeing my mom’s tears I felt, for the first time, the true weight of all the dreams they held for me. Those dreams crystallized that day into something hard and heavy, came to rest on my shoulders. Because I felt it in a real way then what they’d lost, that there should’ve been another eighth-grade graduation before mine, another batch of pictures no one was ever going to look at, and there was never going to be any way to fix what had happened to them. I’d grow up and have my future ahead of me still and still have my dreams out there to reach for, and we’d be different, because I would have the world, I would have my whole life ahead of me, but all they’d have was me.
“Don’t cry,” I whispered to my mom, and patted her hand. I tried to smile. “It’s just eighth grade.”
At the graduation dance that night (butcher-paper palm trees taped to all the walls and the lights turned low, bottles of sparkling cider and those Costco three-flavor packs of cookies), when we were tired of dancing, a bunch of us sat on the bleachers and Harry slung his arm over my shoulders. He’s always been a kind of handsy person. He leaned close to my ear so I could hear him over the music and said, “How come your mom was crying so much today?”
I held still so he didn’t think I was moving to get him off me. “Long story.”
“What’s the story?”
Back then I never really liked talking about my family with most people—it was complicated, I was worried about fitting in, school was where I got to not think about it, etc., etc. But that night—maybe it was how hard it had hit me seeing my mom crying like that, or how before the dance we’d gone to dinner and my dad had given me a framed signed Dashiell Manley print. He’d watched my reaction eagerly, like he wanted to save it, and when he saw how pleased I was he was proud in a way that made him feel more like himself. Or maybe it was the way it felt to sit there on the bleachers with Harry and for him to have made that space for the two of us that way in that whole big sea of people.
So I told him what it had been like. My voice cracked a couple of times; luckily it was loud in there. I was nervous. I guess I’ve always believed that’s what a relationship is, this space you keep between you where you hold each other’s secrets. Or that it’s how you build something together, layering the things you’ve never told anyone else like bricks.
After I finished he was quiet for a long time. Ahmed came over to talk to us and I could see Harry snap into motion, grinning back and laughing, and I wanted to take back everything I’d told him. But then Ahmed went off to ask Sandra to dance and Harry’s grin slid off his face and he turned back to me. He put his hand on my knee.
“It’ll get better,” he said. Harry is an unrepentant optimist, and so I might’ve been willing to write off what he was saying as a cheap platitude, except for the hand on my knee and also for what came next. “It always does. They’ll figure things out and everything will get back to normal. Okay? And in the meantime, I mean—we’ll get you through it.” And there it was again—that same we.
That was when it all made sense to me—why I’d disliked him so ardently at first. It was because something in me recognized how much he would matter to me, all along. I’d just been wrong about the particular way.
I’m not going to try to pass the night off as in any way epic. It was hot in there and everyone was sweaty and you could feel a thousand middle schoolers’ worth of hormones everywhere, and everyone had braces and all the girls were teetering around in their heels and the teachers were skulking around in the corners trying to make sure no one was grinding on each other or otherwise getting too gross.
But still. The dance was also a retreat from the fear I’d been living in at that point. My worst fear about my family was that maybe I would never be enough to make up for what they’d lost, that I wasn’t supposed to be the one who’d lived, and that they’d wind up broken in a way I couldn’t put back together. Maybe they’d break apart from each other entirely. I felt that possibility heavy on my chest every morning when I woke up. By then I could see a future where my family never stopped being a grayer, paler, more trembling version of ourselves, and by then I couldn’t shake the possibility that maybe my fate, all our fates, had been sealed before I was even born when my sister died. It wasn’t hard to see how our future could get swallowed by the past.
And so it was the way he’d said we that felt significant to me—that same we from Yosemite I’d been holding on to all these months, the same one I’d been hoping I hadn’t just imagined. It’s both the best thing that can happen to you and the most dangerous, because what do you have except the people you belong to and who belong to you? But then you can also lose yourself to it; you can do things in service of those wes that end up haunting you.
Harry was, surprisingly, right: things did get better. Something rekindled in my dad—whethe
r that was purpose or hope or something else, I’m not sure, but he felt like himself again. He’d go to social events again and hum in the shower or while making coffee in the morning and joke around with me. And my mom seemed relieved in her quiet, nervous way—that sort of holding her breath, that sense she gives off that she doesn’t quite trust the ground beneath her feet.
I’ve never told Harry how I feel, and daily, probably, I go back and forth about whether he knows. It’s what makes me wonder, too—maybe he’s more open than I am and I already know everything there is.
Or maybe not. Maybe he keeps some of that locked up, like I do.
Anyway, though, since Yosemite we’ve been basically inseparable, but there are ways I don’t let my guard down around him. Someday, maybe—I tell myself that all the time. We’ll see. Sometimes, actually, he’ll say something to me that feels so generous it throws me, but for the most part it’s not like we ever said that kind of thing to each other aloud. We always bickered a lot and also, I mean, the things that always bugged me about him didn’t necessarily stop bugging me once we got close; I just learned to contextualize them differently. They slid off to the side and allowed room for the rest of it in.
All that day after getting home from San Francisco, I think about the 30 Under 30 show at the gallery, and before dinner I finally sit down and look up the submission guidelines. I wanted to just forget about it, but imagining my work being chosen as the innovative, with a fresh and surprising point of view portfolio they’re looking for fills me with a kind of desperate hope. The submission deadline is January. By then—by then I should’ve come out from under this slump. I have to.
I look up Clay Ballard while I’m on the computer. I don’t know quite what I expected, but he’s the same person he seems to be in my dad’s files, and you can only scroll through so many articles about seed capital and startups named things like Marquetz and LunchBunch and StumblPAAC. I look up Clay Ballard Joseph Cheng and Clay Ballard Joseph Tseng, but there’s nothing. I wish I remembered my dad’s Chinese name. But I really only saw it a couple times in my lifetime that I can remember—as a kid you’re not, like, writing out your parents’ legal names anywhere. And I’m sure my dad would get suspicious if I just randomly asked.
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