Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  My parents came back on a Thursday in the middle of the night. I remember them waking me gently, my dad lifting me in his arms. I remember feeling right at that moment how much I’d missed them, how thinking otherwise was only because I’d been so distracted.

  At home they must have let me sleep. In the morning when I woke up my room was stripped bare and my mom had a present for me—a gigantic candy bar she’d bought at the airport that said TEXAS-SIZE CHOCOLATE! on it—and she told me that they had a surprise for me. We were moving, she said, to California. My dad was going to get a new job there. Wouldn’t I like to live in California? I could see the beach and I could see mountains. I could go skiing in the winter, and see real snow. In fact, we were moving right now.

  I fought it as much as you can when you’re six years old and your world’s been pushed out of orbit in spite of you. I didn’t want to leave. And on some level, I think, I was afraid, and over time the fear dropped off because we came here and everything was fine, we’ve been happy, but I remember that now, that I was scared. That even then I think the way everything was happening felt off to me, how fast it was and how we didn’t tell anyone, that I felt that safe, steady image I’d always held of my parents dissolving. I wanted to see Ethan first and my mom told me no, we needed to leave right away. “They’ll give away our new house otherwise!” she said, smiling like she was teasing, like it was something I’d be willing to joke about.

  I never talked back or argued with my parents back then, but I did that time. Even when you’re six, you understand what it means to say goodbye. But they held firm—I wasn’t allowed to go see Ethan; we had to leave right away—and when we went to the parking structure, our car was packed. My shirts were stuffed into a plastic grocery store bag.

  Sometimes I wonder what Ethan remembers. Nothing, maybe. Maybe he’s already forgotten me completely. But every now and then I think maybe I’m wrong and—because he doesn’t know my last name now—he’s just never been able to find me. I wonder what he made of us just packing up and leaving that way. I wonder if he thought I just didn’t care enough to say goodbye.

  And I wonder now, and I can’t fathom what this would mean, but the way we left like that—could it have tied back somehow to however our paths could’ve crossed with the Ballards’ while they were there, too?

  But I still can’t imagine how my parents would even know them, and not just have met them but know them deeply. You don’t run into someone a few times on campus and then build a dossier on everything they’ve ever done.

  At a McDonald’s somewhere in West Texas, where we stopped early on the way to California so my parents could bribe me with a Happy Meal, I cried so hard my muscles ached. My mom sat down next to me.

  “Daniel,” she said, peeling the lid off a packet of honey sauce for my chicken nuggets, “do you know something about goodbyes? It’s worse if they’re long. Otherwise you’ll be sad forever and you poison all you have with your sadness, too. It’s better not to wallow in them. It’s better for you to move on and forget.” She dipped a nugget in the honey and handed it to me, then dabbed at my eyes with a napkin. I thought then how both my parents had left behind a whole country, a whole homeland, and how maybe to them Texas to California felt insignificant and small. It was the only way any of this made sense. She smoothed my hair and cupped my face in her hands. She smiled. And I must have been wrong about it all feeling small to them, because it was the first time I can remember, and I remember this distinctly, ever looking at someone’s smile and realizing it was fake. “You’ll make new friends, won’t you? You’ll be very happy and you’ll forget. You’ll be my strong boy.”

  On Thursday at lunch, Mina Lee and Grace Leung arrive as emissaries from their corner of the academic court to talk to Regina. They come together, like they need reinforcements, pretending the rest of us aren’t there and standing over Regina while she tries to eat her lunch.

  Mina and Grace are both part of a group of maybe a dozen or so girls in our grade and the grades below who’ve all grown up going to Regina’s church together. I don’t know either of them well—aside from Regina her church group has always been pretty insular—but I’ve had enough classes with Mina to get the sense that her view of the world is a series of kind of rigid boxes I probably wouldn’t fit neatly into. Once, hanging out at lunch last year, one of those days we took for granted, Sandra watched from across the rally court as Mina talked with Orson Lam. She mimicked a narration as Mina looked up at him and giggled—Oh, Orson, you are just so funny!—and then when Mina kept tugging down the bottom of her skirt, running her hands over her shoulder like she was checking to make sure her bra straps were in place, Sandra said dryly, “When you want a boyfriend but also your boyfriend is Jesus.” Regina was kind of pissed; she always stuck up for her friends from church. I remembered how Mina said once in AP English that girls who wore tight clothes had low self-esteem—it was a throwaway comment, something that was supposed to be a self-evident truth, and I remembered Sandra was wearing this clingy skirt that day. She referenced that comment once or twice as why she didn’t like Mina, but sometimes I wondered if the truth was that she was kind of jealous of those friends—all those times Regina vanished into them and their world.

  “We just wanted to see how you were doing,” Mina says now. “We haven’t seen you at church in so long.”

  Regina puts up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, squinting up at them. “That’s nice of you. I’ve been good, just busy.”

  Grace and Mina glance at each other. Mina says, “Do you think you’ll come out on Friday night?”

  “I think I actually might have some things I need to work on.”

  “Right,” Grace says, like she expected that answer. “What about Sunday? We’re probably going to start planning Brothers Appreciation Night. We want to do a progressive dinner. We thought maybe your house could be one station since you live right by the Chiens.”

  “Sunday I have SAT tutoring, actually.”

  “Oh.” Grace looks at Mina again, maybe for some sort of confirmation. They’re uncomfortable in a way that makes it clear if there was any way they could’ve managed to have this conversation with just her, and not in front of us, they would’ve. “So, um, how’s your walk with God been going?”

  Lauren Kao and Maurice Wong, who’d been talking with us, both kind of edge away, drifting toward where Abishek Batra is laughing about something I can’t make out. Regina says, “It’s fine.”

  “It’s just really been on our hearts to see how everything’s been going for you.”

  Regina smiles. “Things are fine.”

  “When my mom was in the hospital freshman year it really helped when I was good about doing my quiet times,” Grace says, and it comes out in a rush like maybe she’s been rehearsing it. “I went through this one book—I can lend it to you if—”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  She’s sitting very still, holding the same smile on her face, and you can see them feeling themselves deflect off her. Harry says, “You guys want to sit down?”

  “No, we just wanted to say hi,” Mina says quickly. She turns a little red. “Regina, let us know if there’s anything we can lift up for you, okay? Or let us know if you want to be part of the progressive dinner or anything. And I’ll get you that book.”

  “Great. Thanks.”

  When they’re out of earshot, Harry says, “It sounds kind of nice to have something like that to go to.” He says it with a careful, practiced mildness that makes me think he worries about her more than he lets on. “Your church, I mean. It meant a lot to you, right?”

  “Sure.”

  I say, “Sometimes I wish I believed something like that.”

  She shrugs. “You can.”

  Is that what people think, that you can just decide what to believe that way? That’s not how believing in anything works—you can’t always buy in when you want to, even if you know it would be better if you did. It’s why leaving Texas was so hard for
me as a kid, even as much as I wanted it to be true what my parents told me that it was fine, that we’d be happier.

  Harry watches her. He finishes his lunch, some kind of Paleo bowl from one of those meal-delivery services, then crumples up the (compostable) bowl. “Are you annoyed?”

  “No.”

  I can’t tell if she means it or not. I also can’t tell if she’d answer differently if I weren’t here—if she’d open up with just Harry and no one else.

  “You were kind of acting like it,” Harry says.

  “I mean—” She sighs. “No. I wasn’t. I don’t know.”

  She’s quiet the last few minutes of lunch, and I think she’s maybe a little relieved when the bell rings. All day I think about that. Honestly, I’m not the biggest fan of Mina Lee, but coming and finding Regina when she’s with all her friends, pressing to make sure she’s actually okay according to the terms they always cared about most—when have I done that for her? I should try harder, put myself out there more. I owe her at least that much.

  This is the thing I keep coming back to: the ASB elections last year. Because of what happened with Sandra, mostly, and because I keep going back again and again to try to figure out how much blame I hold and what it all means.

  Harry, of course, was running for senior class president. Harry has been class president every single year since first grade (and I think it says something that I know this, even though I didn’t go to first through sixth grade with him).

  “You should run for vice president,” he said earnestly. “Or like—secretary, or something.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “It would be cool if you won and then we were on it together.”

  “Assuming you win.”

  “Yeah, assuming I do.” He wrapped his fingers into a fist and thumped it gently, pinkie side down, against his palm. “You think I will?”

  “Probably.” Since I first met him, I’m not sure Harry has lost anything more significant than a tennis match.

  “I’ve tried to do a decent job with it before.”

  I knew he was fishing, but I also knew he meant it, that it really mattered to him. I’ve seen how hard he’s worked on ASB stuff, how he’ll send out memos to everyone in Leadership about inclusiveness and campus culture and peer connectedness. When we have rallies, he spends hours trying to get a good cross section of the student body to call up to participate in front of everyone, and he’s always proposing stuff like Tell Someone You Care week or things like that. Every class has its own particular personality, and the class above us was kind of shallow and cruel, the sort of social ecosystem where girls would regularly cry at lunch and if one of the popular kids was talking to you the odds were good it was some kind of joke, and we aren’t like that (thank God) in part because of him. I should’ve just told him that, that I think caring as much as he does and working as hard as he has is something to be proud of, and that if I had to say who the most influential person is on campus it’s him, easily, and I think he’s actually tried to use that in a positive way because in the truest, most non-throwaway sense of the word, Harry’s nice. He is. He’s a nice guy.

  I didn’t, though. I said, “Mm.”

  You would think, perhaps, that eleven out of twelve would be enough of a run and that it wouldn’t matter to him all that much if he got to do it a final time, but you would be dead wrong. I knew how desperately he wanted to win the election. I knew because of how much he didn’t like talking about it. He did all the campaign stuff—he made posters, he went around at lunch and talked to people, joking around with the freshman guys and flirting with all the girls. He emailed me about eight drafts of his speech to read over. But then when you actually asked him about it, he’d change the subject. We all have those things, I think—those things we want too badly to speak about aloud for fear someone’ll swoop in and tell us we’re just dreaming, those things we hold close and fantasize about at night and swear to the world we don’t care that much about, the way I feel about art, the way I want to believe my parents are grateful I was the child who survived. What Harry wants above everything else is to know the world is behind him.

  Most years I don’t think anyone even ran against him, but last year, kind of out of nowhere, Sandra decided to. We had our various cliques-within-cliques but for the most part we had all the same friends, so it felt like a weird move on her part. For one thing, Harry and Regina were going out at that point. Sandra had been the VP since freshman year, which seemed like it was working fine for everyone, but I guess apparently not. “It’s all Game of Thrones up in here,” Ahmed Kazemi had teased, looking between them while they stapled rival posters to the side of the gym. Ahmed had been in love with Sandra forever. I always thought it was a weird pairing—Sandra was a huge partier, for one thing, and even though he went just to hang out, Ahmed was Muslim and didn’t drink. And he was always messing around, always at the nucleus of some joke. Once sophomore year he came to school wearing a T-shirt that said DAMN STRAIGHT, and in second period Mrs. O’Neill made this big deal about it being inappropriate. They argued back and forth until finally Ahmed wrote an R on a Post-it note and taped it over the M on his shirt. “Darn straight,” he announced, flinging his arms in a come-at-me-bro motion, and everyone applauded except Sandra. Mostly Sandra acted annoyed with him, and Ahmed tried to make her laugh. But all the same it seemed like there was a kind of happiness between them, or at least a comfortable set of roles to settle into.

  Anyway, the election was something people talked about a lot—who they’d vote for, whether Sandra was being a bitch by running against him (public verdict: yes, if you already didn’t like her, which a lot of people didn’t), whether it was going to be really embarrassing for whoever didn’t win, etc. It was, I think, borderline agonizing for Regina, who always just smiled when Sandra would link arms with her and say, “Regina’s my campaign manager. Hos before bros.” Regina came over once that week and we sat at my kitchen counter drinking the chrysanthemum tea my mom makes in hot weather and discussed whether there was ever going to be any form of competition that Harry would look at and decide he didn’t care if he won. No, was our consensus. Probably not.

  “Is that exhausting to be with someone like that?” I said. I couldn’t quite look at her when I said it—I swirled the tea around in my cup and watched the little whirlpool it made instead.

  She shrugged. “You’re his best friend. You’re probably with him more than I am. Is it exhausting for you?”

  “It might be if I were as success-driven as you are.”

  “I’m not success-driven,” she protested, and it was such a ridiculous statement I laughed out loud. I teased her about sitting here in my house this way and lying to my face, and she got all snappish the way she always does when you tease her. I remember thinking, in that moment, if my sister had lived it would’ve felt like it always has with Regina.

  “It’s not because Harry doesn’t like other people,” I said. “It’s the opposite. It’s because he wants them to like him.”

  Regina said, “I know.”

  Something in her tone—there was something static about it, something I couldn’t relate to. “Are you happy with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Everyone has good and bad to them.”

  “Whoa, whoa, let’s keep it PG, can we? Get a handle on those hormones, Regina.”

  She kind of laughed. “It’s true, though, right?”

  “I guess, sure. I just think that’s a weird way to look at things with your boyfriend.”

  “Maybe. It’s probably the most fair way to look at everyone.” Then she said, apropos of not very much, “You know, I really think you and Sandra could be pretty tight again if you got over your feuding,” and I got up and cleared our empty cups. I said, “Mm.”

  My relationship with Sandra was, at that point, nonexistent most days and awkward/residually negative the others. This is what happened, or at least this was the first thing: The da
y before school started freshman year, I was supposed to hang out with Sandra. Since none of us could drive yet and Regina and Harry were way up in the hills, she and I had seen a lot of each other that summer. Which is what I told myself when Harry called me that day—he’d just gotten back from a few weeks in Taiwan—and I told him I was free, and a few minutes later I let Sandra’s call go to voicemail.

  Harry got a ride down the hill from his dad and at my house we decided to walk to Pearlbubble. We’d gotten to the end of the street when my phone buzzed with a text from Sandra: What are you doing? I’m bored.

  I could’ve just said I’m with Harry, we’re walking to get boba, you want to come? But the truth was that I didn’t want her there. Not even her in particular, nothing personal; it was just that it had been weeks since I’d seen Harry and I didn’t want his attention pulled away.

  Busy right now, I wrote back. And then, because it felt too abrupt, I added, You get your class schedule already? What is it?

  She didn’t answer, and I pushed away the twinges of guilt. A few seconds later Harry pulled his phone out of his pocket and glanced at it. There was a plummeting feeling in my stomach; I knew already, I think.

  “It’s Sandra,” he said. He lifted his head and looked around. “Doesn’t she live right by here? I’ll tell her to meet us.”

  If there was a plausible reason I could’ve given to say no, I couldn’t get there in time. We waited for her on the corner. She found us five or six minutes later—her house was just on the next street over.