Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “You look tired,” I say. In the fluorescent lighting I can see the dark circles under his eyes.

  “Yep.”

  “You up studying or something?”

  “Nah. I was just—I couldn’t sleep. My parents were on me about next year.”

  We both settle into the chairs in front of computer stations. The school sprung for the nice kind of chairs, swiveling padded ones, except they’re constantly getting poached into other classrooms so we’re always half a dozen short, and we fight over them. I always lose. I don’t fight hard enough. I say, “They’re on you how? It’s too late to do anything now. Your applications are all in.”

  “I know. They’re just worried I didn’t do enough. My mom keeps saying I should’ve done more SAT tutoring.”

  “You did so much SAT tutoring, Harry.”

  “Yeah, but I really think I could’ve gotten a perfect score. I just kept choking on test days.”

  He missed the perfect score by ten points, in the end. “I really doubt that’s going to break you.”

  He shrugs. “My mom thinks it will.”

  I know what his parents can be like, but still, it defies the imagination that anyone could know Harry and wish he were somehow different or more. I want to tell him that, want him to know I mean it. I clear my throat. “Harry, you know—”

  But at the exact same time he starts to talk. “They definitely—”

  We both stop, and he motions for me to go ahead. But it’s too late; my face has gone hot, my courage dissolved. “Nothing. What were you going to say?”

  “I mean, they’ve definitely backed off some compared to last year, but I don’t think they’re actually like any more cool with me going to like Irvine or something. They’re just worried about me going over the edge.”

  “You’re definitely not going to end up at Irvine.”

  He grins. “Who knows, though, right? I could drop out and become a pro surfer.”

  “You hate the ocean.”

  “That’s true.” He swivels his chair toward me and kicks lightly at my ankle. “You know dolphins don’t need to sleep for days? And they play with their prey before they kill—”

  “Yes, I know, you’ve told me that like six times.” He has a thing about dolphins. “But you’re definitely not—”

  The door pushes open, and we both go quiet. It’s Regina, backlit by the morning sun. She blinks at us. “What are you guys doing in here?”

  “We got to school early.” Harry stands and kisses her forehead. Maybe I’m just imagining it that he deflated a little when she came in. Just projecting, probably, because of those times I feel it myself, that urge in me that resists other people wedging apart a moment I didn’t even realize I was so invested in. “What are you doing?”

  “Working on my piece for the center spread.”

  I knew I’d see her, obviously, but I didn’t think it would be yet, and it feels like staring into an eclipse. I say, quietly, “Hey.” What I don’t say is Please don’t think I’m a terrible person. Please don’t think what happened to Sandra was even a little bit my fault. Please don’t tell Harry. When I meet her eyes, I can tell—I know her—she knows exactly what I’m thinking. That’s the hardest thing to walk away from in somebody: those spaces where you’re known and mirrored back.

  “Hi, Danny,” she says. Her real voice, the one she uses in private, is pitched lower than her public one—plain and unadorned, missing all the embellishments she has when addressing a roomful of people, or a group. And I trust it, less because of that and more because, in all the time I’ve known her, it’s how she sounds when she’s at her most vulnerable. “Harry told me about your plan.”

  I bring my chair-swiveling to a halt. “Ah—yeah.”

  “You’re going through with it? You’re just staying here?”

  “Assuming I can pull it off.”

  I have been through a whole lifetime with Regina; I could never untangle her from my history even if I wanted to. You always think people will give you a sign, that when you know them as well as I know her you’ll be attuned to it, that even within those secrets hanging between you you can parse meaning in a look, a careful word.

  Regina gives me more than that, though. She sits across from me and touches my wrist, and when I meet her eyes she offers a tiny smile, one that means—I know her—we’re okay. “I’m really glad you’re back.”

  It’s funny how almost losing something makes you see it all differently—makes it rise up in your vision all shining and bright.

  I miss my house and my old life, my real life, constantly. Whenever I go by our old street the anger that’s always burning in me flares up, the flames licking at my lungs. But at least here I have friends, a place I belong, a world I’ve made myself a part of that I can find myself in. We’re knitted together, all of us, in our history and hopes and grief and guilt and all those things we saw each other through and in twenty years any one of the people I know from here could call me up and ask me a favor, and I’d do anything for them. I would. In Regina I have someone who knows probably the worst parts of me and still thinks there’s enough left over worth keeping, who decided to keep our friendship even knowing what she knows, which I will never take for granted. And in Harry I have—still not sure how I’d put it, exactly, but what I do have I managed to keep. For now.

  So there’s a part of me that, when I’m at school, is always something close to euphoric, the way it feels when you slam on the brakes right in time and can see over the ledge. When you’re with the right people you can feel like you’re hidden wherever you are. But every morning, as soon as I wake up, that dull gray patch that retreated in the night flies back to me and spreads itself expertly and efficiently over my whole body. It dims the light around me and pulls a dark film over my eyes. Mr. X watches, grimly indifferent, reminding me, always reminding me, that I deserve nothing more than this, demanding some objective proof of what I think I’m worth, why I should’ve been the one who lived.

  I’m scared all the time—all the time—of losing this. It could be anything. Maybe some kind of important mail will get sent home and I’ll miss it, or I’ll accidentally say the wrong thing in front of a teacher or one of our old neighbors saw the moving trucks and will call and report me to the school. (The real Mr. X still lives there, probably, if he hasn’t white flighted himself somewhere free of Ranch 99s and Tapiocas Express.) And I’m terrified I’ll slip up and my parents will find out.

  My parents have, by all appearances, accepted the course of our new lives as inevitable. We don’t talk about my mom living with the family she’s paid to be a part of; when she spends the night here on weekends and my dad’s gone we say nothing as she checks the deadbolt dozens of times and peers motionlessly out the peephole when we hear footsteps coming down the hallway. And when they ask me about the new school it’s only questions you’re supposed to answer like you’re happy: Your new school has less homework, that’s nice, huh?

  Their determination to pretend everything is fine is starting to mess with me. Have I just developed some inflated sense of entitlement—I think I’m too good for anything but the best schools, the best cities? There are always people who have it worse. That, I think, is the implication lurking behind every look my parents give me: it could be worse, and I should be grateful for what I have. And maybe both those things are true. And so we don’t comment on any of it like it’s anything strange or surprising or wrong. Your eyes adjust to the dark.

  My dad comes home from a shift one night when we’ve been there a little over two weeks, and I’m awake still because every time I heard a sound outside I had to get up, my heart galloping, to check the hallway outside.

  He opens the fridge. It’s still mostly empty, and he takes the last of a pack of frozen dumplings from the freezer and microwaves them and then slumps heavily into one of the kitchen chairs. The gray of his uniform pulls out the grayish tones in his skin. And maybe it’s that soft, desperate mood you fall into waiting at night,
that stage it builds for all your fears to come alive, but in spite of everything I feel a surge of tenderness toward him, a twin surge of guilt for all the ways I’ve been lying to them. This is what being in a family is—how your home holds all those things, the whole spectrum of everything you feel toward them. You can’t always hold on to everything at once, but the rest of it is always right there so close to you, ready for you to pick it up again. It’s the opposite of a blank page, how you can feel pissed off and guilty and nervous all at once, how you can remain angrier at your dad than you’ve ever been at anyone and at the exact same time still feel seared by the sight of his pain. Maybe he never deserved all the ways his life has unraveled, whatever those were. I say, impulsively, “Can I tell you something?”

  My dad shoves a dumpling into his mouth, then wipes his lips with one of the paper napkins my mom took from the Ranch 99 deli. His voice is flat and tired. “What is it?”

  Maybe it’s not the right time after all. “I forgot.”

  “You didn’t forget.”

  “Um—do you like the job?”

  It’s not what I wanted to say—I wanted to say something affectionate, but I lost my nerve—and my tone comes out strange, almost flippant. And the look on his face right then—he swallows hard and fights to get control of his jaw, which is quavering, and it’s then that I realize: he thinks I meant that to make fun of him.

  My heart tears in half. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”

  He tries to smile, tries to act like he’s in on the joke, but his voice comes out harsh. “It’s great. Just what I always dreamed. Why your mother and I came here.”

  I never meant it that way. Couldn’t he hear that—didn’t he feel that same softness I was feeling?

  “Then why did you let all this happen?” I say, my voice low with anger. How could he think that about me, that I’d say that to him?

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why did you tell Ma it wasn’t your experiment that ruined you? Are you in debt?”

  This time I recognize the look that flickers over his face before he chases it off—that same fear again. This time, though, I see how deeply rooted it is, how easily it’s pushed to the surface.

  I shouldn’t have brought it up. Maybe you only ever say aloud the things you want easy answers for, the fears you want to be laid to rest.

  My dad stands up abruptly. “It turns out I’m not hungry after all.” He shoves the bowl of dumplings across the table at me, mostly untouched. “Have the rest.”

  Latenights for our March issue start that Tuesday, and the paper will come out on the seventh, next Thursday. Watching the anniversary come nearer, like a plane on its final approach, makes me claustrophobic. I can feel the walls inching closer each time someone brings it up.

  Regina’s gone into her Latenight Mode early this cycle, holed up in the Journalism Lab lunchtimes and after school. On Tuesday she comes into the lab with cookies she baked everyone—I saw her online at four-thirty in the morning when I got up and figured she just hadn’t slept yet, and the cookies make me think I’m right—and two bottles of coffee. Minuet Lam, who’s always in charge of getting snacks, has scattered bags of chips and jerky and Pocky around all the computers, and there’s a fruit platter at the tables.

  Things always pick up like this toward the end of a production cycle—everyone blows off deadlines in favor of studying for AP tests or finishing lab reports (everyone gets an A in Journalism anyway), and then in the last days before we have to go to press that loose panic of failure descends and we all bring sweats to school and set up camp in the Journalism Lab every night until after dark. A few times we’ve stayed right up until 11:59, the last possible minute before the alarms switch on for the night and we have to be out of all the buildings, holding our breath as we shut the doors behind us.

  I like watching people be good at things, and so from within that noise and chaos of the latenights I’ve always liked watching Regina roam all competently around the room, how effortless she makes it seem to give advice and tweak layouts and cut stories down to fit into their allotted column inches. I know she’s always kind of stressed in the way you are about things you care about, but still she makes latenights a place you actually want to be, that same particular amalgam of frenetic and cozy you get with group projects that go really late into the night and that I wonder whether you ever get again after high school. That I’m glad I didn’t give up.

  Harry’s late today, at an ASB meeting, and it’s different without him—more industrious, I think, less like we’re all hanging out. I keep watching Regina’s computer to try to see the center spread she’s been working on, but she’s turned the screen’s brightness all the way down and angled the monitor toward the wall. She’s quieter than usual, too, tucked away in the corner, and it’s at least an hour before she gets up to go around the room checking in with everyone. When she does, Chris Young covers his screen with his hands and orders, “Shield your eyes, Regina. Go check on someone else.”

  She peers at what he’s doing. “Are you just writing your story straight into InDesign?”

  He brings a fist to his chest, grinning. “Regina. Stab me in the heart. You’d accuse me of such betrayal? When I know how much you hate when people write straight into—”

  “Just make sure you spell-check.”

  Chris lets his eyebrows go up a little, watching her pass by. Andrew Hatmaker flicks a pencil at him. It hits him on the shoulder. And I’m kind of watching them, and also glancing back at the door each time it opens watching for Harry, and because of that I don’t hear what happens just before the noise level in the room dims all at once. Then Regina says, “What?”

  She’s in the first row of computers, Lori Choi standing next to her, something defensive in Lori’s posture. Lori says, “Esther wants to tell you something.”

  Esther says, “Lori, shut up.” She’s sitting down still, not looking away from her screen.

  “What?” Regina repeats.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, she does.” Lori nudges her. “Tell her.”

  “Lori—”

  “Esther doesn’t think the center spread is a good idea.”

  All the rest of the noise is plunged from the room. Next to me, Emily Chien puts her pencil down.

  Regina frowns. “Are you really that worried about—”

  “I’m not worried,” Esther says. “It just feels too political to me. It feels like using someone who died just to make your point about free speech, and I don’t think it’s right.”

  “You think—” Regina says flatly. “You think it seems like using—”

  But then her control slips, her voice giving out on her. She closes her eyes like she wishes she had somewhere to hide.

  The lights buzz quietly above us. Advaith shifts in his seat and bites his lip, staring hard at his screen.

  “I’m just saying,” Esther says. There’s a tremor in her voice I don’t know her well enough to translate, but my best guess is this: she believes that. And she’s felt this way long enough to have been seduced by the idea of her own rightness, with the image of herself as the one person in the room willing to stand up for what’s right.

  And, I mean: what in the absolute hell. Everyone knows—everyone knows—Sandra was Regina’s best friend.

  I can’t get down quite enough air. Next to me Megan is blinking rapidly at her screen, and everyone’s waiting, and it’s all such a glaring, enormous silence for Regina to fill.

  “I think,” Regina says, her voice shaking, “that we can’t—” She stops.

  I know—most of my life I’ve known—what it’s like to have so much to say to someone who isn’t there. It’s that you can’t defend yourself against all those ugly accusations that crop up in your own mind—that you didn’t care enough, that you don’t deserve to be the one surviving. Or you can, it’s just that you can’t defend yourself to the one person who matters most. Regina knows perfectly well it’s a garbage suggestion that her ul
terior motive is to make some kind of political statement, I’m sure, but Sandra doesn’t; Sandra will never know anything again. But it’s her opinion and her approval and her recognition that Regina actually cares about. It was always like that, the way they’d text incessantly about even the smallest things like sending each other pictures of what they were going to wear to school or the way they’d read books together so they could call each other at midnight and complain about characters they hated or the way Sandra would sometimes say things like Ugh, I’m such a bitch, and Regina would just laugh and link her arm though Sandra’s and say No, you just pretend you are, and you could tell that meant something real and vital to Sandra, that she trusted and also needed the way Regina saw her. And Regina needs all that to matter still, needs Sandra to understand it matters still, and that’s the part—that maybe that’s why she’s been wanting to do this tribute—that wrecks me. All our doomed, desperate dreams.

  Esther says, “It isn’t okay for us to—”

  “This isn’t your call,” I say. I tilt back my chair so I can meet her eyes over the computers. “You weren’t there.”

  “Yes, I was. I was here last year. And it doesn’t feel right to—”

  She doesn’t understand, that’s entirely clear. And, I guess, how could she? She was a freshman last year. How do you explain Sandra to someone who only ever knew her, reduced and clipped and faded, from that letter they read us all in first period?

  So I should—can—reach past that first flash of anger and rummage around for some measure of generosity. “Esther—I get that you’re trying to do the right thing. And that’s cool, that’s good, but by any possible metric that could matter, you weren’t there.” I say it as gently as I can, but I don’t wait for an answer; it doesn’t matter what she’ll say. This isn’t hers to care about. “Regina,” I say, before I can talk myself out of it, “I’m in. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do anything. You wanted a portrait, right? You still want one? I’ll do a portrait for you. Whatever you want. Count me in.”